1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to automated computing systems, and more specifically to a system and method for specifying equivalent resources in a policy driven autonomic computing system.
2. Description of Related Art
With the proliferation of computer systems in everyday life, our reliance on the availability of these systems has become increasingly evident. Today, computer systems control everything from our bank and commerce systems, to educational and health records, and even our entire power grids. The need for redundancy and robustness for these systems grows ever apparent. This need has given rise to a new class of computer system known as high availability systems. Typically, these systems are structured with varying degrees of redundancy that can be configured by an administrator.
In traditional administrative environments, reactions to events are either driven by system operators reacting in real time, or by a very limited set of automation actions which must be predefined for each event that may occur. Traditional solutions generally fail to address the real world complexities in that it is difficult to impossible to predefine all of the events that may occur and the actions to be taken for them—especially when one considers that sequences of events may occur which need to be reacted to. This generally creates an intractable exploding network of potential events, one proceeding from the other, all of which must be accounted for through defined actions.
There are some high availability automation products which encompass some limited state driven knowledge where a set of resources is managed with the simple rule that all must be active or none are. However, the relationships of these resources are not defined and the actions to be taken are all scripted for a given event. Other known solutions have limited definitional characteristics in that dependency relationships for ordering start/restart may be defined but the full generality is not specifiable.
In defining the relationships between resources in a system (in order to specify the policy relationships among the system elements) it is often necessary to repetitively define relationships on sets of resources—all of which are essentially equivalent. While this is of course possible, it does require excessive time and care on the part of an administrator to properly define these relationships. It is also quite cumbersome, in a system purposefully having redundancies in order to avoid catastrophe, to have to define each possible scenario that may occur for each piece resource in the system, in order to have a feasible solution.
Therefore a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art as discussed above, and particularly for a method of specifying equivalent relationships in autonomic computing systems.